COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR MARK VON HAGEN'S
REPORT TO THE NEW YORK TIMES ABOUT THE REPORTING OF
WALTER DURANTY FROM MOSCOW IN THE EARLY 1930'S
[He subsequently recommended returning the Pulitzer Prize]

Commissioned Report to the New York Times
Professor Mark Von Hagen
Columbia University, New York, NY
July 24, 2003 [Entire Report Made Public October 24, 2003]

I've chosen to organize my comments below by sharing the kinds
of questions about Duranty's reporting that I, as a historian who has
studied this period, might reasonably ask. What is the focus of his
reporting? What appear to be his sources? Does he get out of Moscow (to
other parts of the USSR) very often? What sources might he have tapped on
his frequent trips to Berlin, Paris, and other European capitals? How strict
were Soviet press censors at this point? What sort of "story" was he
telling about the Soviet Union and to what end, if any? I also thought of
comparing what Duranty wrote with other correspondents' work, but decided to
try to appraise his work on its own merits and in the context of the
historical period in which he was writing. I also tried to keep an open
mind about the writing, especially after having read the two
"biographies-denunciations" of Duranty by S. J. Taylor (Stalin's Apologist,
Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Man in Moscow) and James Crowl
(Angels in Stalin's Paradise). Both of these books appear to have been
conceived as virtual character assassinations and rely heavily on innuendo,
insinuation and hostile speculation by Duranty's enemies in the press corps
above all, particularly Eugene Lyons (in Assignment in Utopia) and Malcolm
Muggeridge (in his fictionalized memoir Winter in Moscow). The two authors'
own grasp of Soviet, American and European history leaves much to be
desired. Moreover, Taylor conflates material from memoirs, interviews, and
fictional accounts and suggests these are all equivalent sources. Still,
they provide some useful historical background and context of the Moscow
reporting scene during these years.

The reporting that the Pulitzer Prize Committee cites in
support of its nomination of Duranty was for the first five-year plan,
curiously, some of his driest stories for the year 1931. Most of the
reports are long discussions of Soviet production statistics, either
projected ones or achieved ones. All of this material comes from official
Soviet sources, either newspapers or speeches by the leadership. Duranty
learned Russian well enough to read the Soviet newspapers on his own, and
appeared to be invited to all important officially designated newsworthy
events. Not surprisingly, most of the stories on the "economic front" have
the level of interest and excitement of Pravda, Izvestiia, or Promyshlennaia
and Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, his favorite sources. He frequently writes in
the enthusiastically propagandistic language of his sources, again without
any ironic distance or critical commentary: "rural revolution flamed like a
fiery beacon across Russia (2/16/31)." In what is perhaps an extreme case
of this socialist realist vision of reality, Duranty describes Soviet
children as "the freest, most upstanding and intelligent children the NYT
correspondent has ever met anywhere. They are clean which Russians used not
be, they play games for fun and think their country is the greatest ever . .
. .They do not care a rap about what Americans call comfort, but they know
the job of united effort and have an opportunity to take part in national
life in drives or campaigns or investigations or what-not to a degree
enjoyed by no other children in the world (5/31/31)."

Even the shortcomings that Duranty highlights in the Soviet
campaigns in the countryside and industrial worlds come most often from the
same Soviet sources-that, for example, production was behind target at one
or another plant, or that the harvest would be lower in wheat than
anticipated (1/3/31, 1/6/31, 3/26/31, 5/12/31). Generally, however, the
plan is being fulfilled and overfulfilled with a great degree of rational
planning, according to Duranty (6/1/31). He does pose the question for his
readers about the reliability of Soviet statistics, to conclude that they
are generally within a margin of error of 3 to 5 percent (2/7/31). (Given
the thorough purges of the Soviet statistical administration already in the
mid-1920s, this seems very generous indeed.) Perhaps more remarkable is
that Duranty is convinced that the new Russia finds its newspapers
interesting, and "even blase foreign correspondents find themselves
unexpectedly interested (5/6/31)." As someone who has read quite a bit in
the Soviet newspapers and leadership speeches of the 1920s and early 1930s,
I find this taste very bizarre. And we also know from the contemporary press
that they attracted regular readership only with great difficulty because of
their insistence on making their "new" conform to the desired outcome of
the current political or economic campaign. The only occasional additional
source he cites are conversations with foreign diplomats, engineers and
workers who either come through Moscow on their way into or out of the
country or who work on projects in Moscow (5/27/31). There is little
evidence that Duranty traveled much around the country or talked to many
ordinary Russians or other Soviet citizens; all his stories have Moscow
datelines (though that might not be the accurate conclusion to draw from
that practice).

To Duranty's credit, however, he recognized that this period of
collectivization and industrialization marked a qualitatively new stage in
Soviet history, something he would call Stalinism and which, while emerging
somehow logically from Lenin's achievements, made 1930 "perhaps the most
critical" year "in all its checkered history." (1/1/31, 6/14/31) Moreover,
he recognized some of the peculiar features of the "plan" and its role in
the Soviet economy, that it was not just a set of economic targets but a
mythical mobilizational tool for the population (1/2/31) Duranty does not
seem to be much interested in internal political developments at the
Kremlin, but focuses on the very narrowly economic side of the "war" against
backwardness. He reports on the Menshevik Trial and another engineers'
trial in Moscow, but virtually reproduces the charges of wrecking and
sabotage brought by the prosecution without any serious scrutiny of the
evidence (3/4/31).

By this time, of course, overly positive mention of Trotsky or
other opposition figures would likely provoke censor reactions. Beginning
in the late 1920s, foreign reporters began feeling new pressures on what
they could and couldn't send out of Moscow. In 1929 a German reporter for
the Berliner Tagesblatt was denied a re-entry visa after he made a home
trip. Still, other reporters were getting around the country much more and
appeared to have a wider range of sources they could interview and cite than Duranty. And Duranty himself acknowledges that the censorship was
relatively mild, if somewhat self-defeating for the Soviet cause (6/23/31);
he described the wartime censorship in France as stricter than the regime
the Press Officer enforced in Moscow. "On the whole, your correspondent is
inclined to regard the censorship as a help no less than a hindrance,
because it takes the responsibility off a reporter's shoulders should there
be subsequent complaints from any quarter." (3/1/31)

Advocate of U.S. Recognition of the U.S.S.R.

Within the general range of this reporting, Duranty pursued a
couple of "missions," if that's not too strong a characterization of his
tone and line of argument. One was US recognition of the USSR. Accordingly,
he made a determined effort to "explain" to his readers the injustice of the
charges made by many, including in America, of Soviet dumping and forced
labor (1/12/31). "To use the words `conscription' or `drafting' of labor
gives an unfair picture of what is happening," he writes (2/1/31, 2/13/31)
and proceeds to compare the Soviet first five-year plan mobilizations to the
United States after it entered the Great War. Duranty offered this sort of
explanation repeatedly in the context of the debate in the United States
over recognition of the USSR, an issue that was also part of presidential
campaign politics. (A separate story in the NYT, not written by Duranty,
reports that Representative Fish of New York sought means to prevent
convict-made good from Russian from entering the United States and asked the
Treasury Department to have agents go into Russia to see if their lumber and
pulpwood exports were produced by forced labor. 2/3/31) Most often, Duranty
concludes his explanation with insisting that the charges are not serious
obstacles to good relations with the USSR and that Soviet practice, given
the historical circumstances and great historical tasks that the Stalinist
leadership has undertaken, are little different than the behavior of any
number of Great Powers during the recent World War I. In a story about tens
of thousands of forced laborers, Duranty wrote,"The great majority of exiles
are not convicts, or even prisoners," but can be compared to Cromwell's
colonization of Virginian and the West Indies (2/3/31). But the main moral
of all these stories is to lay to rest any talk about a "Red trade menace"
(4/8/31).

He reminds his readers that the Soviet market is a large and
unsatisfied one and that the potential is there for a great economic success
story in the not too distant future. He also insisted that despite a
certain Soviet Schadenfreude about the Great Depression and their general
expectation of new world war breaking out over the "contradictions" of
global capitalism (4/22/31, 5/18/31, 10/24/31), they were relatively
self-absorbed and had abandoned their plans for global conquest, if, as he
puts it, they ever had such plans. The Stalinist leadership and the society
at large was overwhelmed by the tasks of building socialism, consolidating
the collective and state farm sectors in agriculture and building the
foundations for modern industry. Their interests were in peace with their
neighbors and trading partners for their primary commodities (4/12/31,
6/18/31, 11/29/31). The Red Army existed entirely for the purpose of
defense and was no menace to peace (6/25/31), he wrote, repeating War
Commissar Voroshilov. After all, the capitalist powers did also continue to
entertain fantasies of overthrowing the one, proletarian dictatorship to
have seized power, so such defensive precautions were only necessary
(11/25/31, 11/29/31). Again, many, if not most, of these stories read as
translated press conferences with the Soviet Foreign Minister or Foreign
Trade Minister with minimal or no commentary or analysis. In several
pieces, Duranty makes a special effort to refute or explain away reports
coming from "White Russian emigre circles" in Riga and elsewhere as clearly
out of touch and so hostile as to have no credibility whatsoever (2/1/31,
2/3/31). Finally, in his apparent effort to win US recognition for the USSR,
Duranty wrote occasional stories about how other countries, notably Germany,
Austria, even England, might beat the US to the vast Soviet markets
(2/23/31, 2/24/31, 3/11/31, 3/24/31, 4/4/31, 6/19/31, 9/28/31).

It is not clear to me what precise role Duranty played in the
politics of recognition (US recognized USSR in 1933 after Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was elected president; Duranty was received by the president after
the recognition ceremony and returned to Moscow with the newly appointed
US ambassador; in Moscow he was feted by Stalin for his role in the
recognition campaign) but I can't help feeling it wasn't insignificant.
What this raises, then, is his complicity in the diplomacy of the US-Soviet
relationship. And, though these are separate issues, the Ukrainian famine
denial is inextricably part of this moral responsibility and part of a
broader problem outlined below. Might not the US been able to insist on
different recognition terms, including, possibly, the admission of famine
relief workers to the afflicted regions? Or, in the rush to recognition,
was the business and political elite eager to overlook any evidence of
troubling behavior on the part of the Soviet Union at this time?

Duranty's "Theories" about Russia and the Soviet Union

When he wasn't reporting straight economic news or discussing
international trade issues, Duranty indulged in his theories about Russia,
which are a bit more disturbing from the viewpoint of objectivity, a
balanced picture, and the tremendous influence of the NYT. Throughout 1931
Duranty proclaimed that Stalin was a progressive historical figure on the
order of Oliver Cromwell (2/3/31, 2/15/31) or Napoleon (1/18/31), who was
fighting a war against his own Slavic people's Asiatic backwardness. (In
the 1/18/31 long feature on Stalin, Duranty opens with comparisons to
Chinese emperors and then proceeds to Mohammed.)

That Asiatic backwardness he characterized alternately as
passivity, fatalism, collectivism, proclivity to mass behavior (as opposed
to the individualism of the liberal west), fanatic religiosity and
superstition, antheap morality (5/4/31, 5/10/31, 7/5/31, 11/22/31, 12/20/31)
Somehow Stalin was able to escape this Slavic fatalism because he was a
Caucasian "who can hold fast to the thread of his own free will in the
labyrinth where Slavs are lost."[!1/81/31] (How Caucasians are less Asian
than Slavs Duranty doesn't muse about.) Incidentally, Duranty was by no
means unique in holding these views; one can cite the very influential
biography of Stalin by Isaac Deutscher, an ostensible follower of Trotsky,
as perhaps the most well-known purveyor of a version of this Orientalist
interpretation. And "softer" versions of this "explanation" are widespread
among the historians and other social scientists who wrote under the
influence of modernization theory as well. The conclusion we are meant to
draw from this "analysis," however, is that Russians need and deserve this
kind of harsh, autocratic regime because that's the way they are; they might
even unconsciously long for autocracy (6/14/31).

Of course, this preferred narrative of Russians as backward
Asiatics was one that the Stalinist dictatorship favored itself as
justification for its brutal regime (as so many Asian dictatorships have
offered in recent times under the guise of "Asian values"), although it
would never have put it in so many words. I suppose it's this near identity
of Duranty's "analysis" with the official Soviet version of events that is
most disturbing for me as a historian. His near total reliance on official
Soviet sources went hand in hand with this "understanding" of Soviet
politics and Russian history. When this myth of Slavic backwardness is
repeated often enough as "news," especially when no challenge to it is ever
offered from another point of view, it takes on the character of a natural
truth, when it is clearly an ideological construction that is playing a
nefarious role inside the country, but, in Duranty's translation, also in
international affairs. I shall devote most of the rest of this review of
Duranty's work to this one-sided presentation of the Stalinist project; I
have also tried to suggest some of the contexts that allowed Duranty to be
able to see the Soviet world in such blatantly positive light. Above all,
these contexts are the Great Depression in the West and Duranty's own
experience of World War I in France and on other fronts.

Whatever the causes for Duranty's so thoroughly identifying with
the Stalinist position, the consequences are perhaps most apparent in his
treatment of-or rather downpedaling of--resistance to collectivization and
industrialization. During 1931 the official Stalinist view of society was
one of harmony and conciliation in line with the remarkable successes on the
economic front (8/31/31). Similar to the regime's own self-understanding,
Duranty downplayed the significance of the widespread and violent resistance
to collectivization that had taken place across the Soviet Union during
1929-30 and again 1930-31, in fact a virtual civil war in the countryside
which would have been hard for Duranty to remain ignorant of. He does
mention kulak friction or opposition as much diminished over the previous
year and apparently a thing of the past (4/22/31, 11/19/31) and,
importantly, a sign of peasant backwardness. For Duranty to attribute the
difficulties of collectivization to peasant backwardness is particularly
distorting; in fact, collectivization wrought the greatest damage in those
regions where the peasants had the most modern skills, had the longest
history of voluntary rural cooperation, and were most productive, namely
Ukraine, the Kuban, the areas cultivated by the Volga Germans. To
pronounce the destruction of that independent peasantry and its replacement
by what the peasants themselves referred to as the "second serfdom" as
progressive and a triumph over Slavic fatalism and backwardness lends
weight to the Stalinist dictatorship's own justification for its violent and
murderous assault on its own countryside.

Similarly, Duranty dismissed the political opposition to aspects
of collectivization and industrialization policy within the ruling Bolshevik party, an opposition that unleashed a series of purges and expulsions
(5/20/31). Because these acts of resistance and opposition had been crushed
by a ruthless Stalinist state, it was now "the Russian condition" to be
eternally fatalistic, passive, inclined to backward anarchistic outbursts in
infantile, monolithic fashion. There were constant show trials since 1928
at least which featured Soviet or foreign engineers or professors charged
with some sort of sabotage, wrecking, or other "crimes" against the
revolution. If Duranty wasn't aware of this powerful opposition from
sources inside the Soviet Union, something that is frankly hard to imagine,
he would have had plenty of opportunity to learn more about this when he
made his regular trips out of Moscow to Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and Prague.
In all four capitals there were very politically engaged and well-informed
Russian emigre organizations and institutions that met regularly and
clandestinely even at this late date with visiting Soviet bureaucrats,
diplomats, and other "agents" and developed rather sophisticated
understanding of the political life of the USSR. Among the best informed
were the Mensheviks abroad, who published Sostialisticheskii vestnik. In
Prague during the interwar years, there were whole universities of emigre
Russian and Ukrainian liberals and some conservatives who would also have
offered alternate "narratives" of modern and more ancient Russian history.
In Warsaw, too, there were several very good scholars and specialized
institutes that made it their business to understand the history and
contemporary affairs of the Soviet Union (and Duranty did make occasional
trips to Poland).

When he wrote another characteristic piece about why the
communists only allowed voting for communist party candidates, Duranty
condescendingly explained that Russians were so uneducated in
self-government that they needed to be taught this fundamental truth by the
all-wise party (1/26/31), again ignoring the history of early
twentieth-century Russia and well into the civil war years when political
parties and public organizations mobilized millions of voters in a series of
doomed democratic and revolutionary governments. To say that Russians had
no and especially no recent memory of a more genuine electoral politics is
extremely distorting. For someone who was an adult--as was Duranty--during
the Russian revolution and a correspondent in France during the First World
War, there is another story about the Russian people that he ought to have
known, that the subjects of the Russian Empire were among the most
oppositionist and revolutionary and even anarchistic people on the earth's
surface for several years running until they had the will to fight killed in
them by so many invading armies, famines, and a few other natural and
man-made disasters. This is not to argue, by contrast, that Russia had
become a model European parliamentary democracy during the early twentieth
century or even that its "genuine" workers' revolution had been betrayed by
the Bolshevik dictatorship. But to insist on the power of eternal Slavic
fatalism, as Duranty so frequently invokes, is to ignore the tremendous
transformations that had occurred in the early decades of the twentieth
century. It is very present-bound and short-sighted and, more importantly,
it conveys precisely the anti-democratic justification for the creation of a
dictatorship that was mastered by the Stalinist propaganda apparatus.

In another characteristic vein, Duranty devotes several pieces
to the decline in religious services at Easter and Christmas (12/26/31), and
above all the razing of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, again as signs
of progress and triumph over traditional Russian religious obscurantism
(8/3/31, 12/26/31) There is little hint here of the concerted antireligious
campaigns, including outright repression and not just the League of the
Militant Godless anti-Christmas and anti-Easter demonstrations. Instead, he describes how Soviet citizens are joyously celebrating their new Soviet
holidays through increasing output and other achievements (18/8/31). One
waits in vain for some signal of ever so slight tongue in cheek.

Duranty warned his American readers again and again not to try
to judge Soviet life by their own comfortable standards. Besides Cromwell,
Napoleon, Ivan the Terrible and other more distant historical parallels,
another device he frequently deployed to "explain" for his American readers
how the Soviet regime could be so apparently indifferent to the comfort and
freedoms of its citizens was to appeal to his own World War I experience.
Knowing what we know about the traumatic impact that the Great War had
on so many intellectuals and ordinary combatants and appreciating the
proximity of the shared experience he could appeal to, he tries again and
again to contextualize the Soviet hardships against the backdrop of that
suicidal European civil war. Certainly in its own self-image, the Soviet
leadership was engaged in a war to defeat its own backwardness. But Duranty
never seems to question the logic of a country putatively at peace waging
war
against its own population and erecting the entire panoply of internal
enemies
and enemy aliens that seem to come straight out of a more strictly military
experience; he never questions the "normalcy" of a militarizing society and
the tremendous assaults on what fragile liberties Soviet citizens still
enjoyed during the NEP years. He, I think, therefore misleadingly,
compares Stalin occasionally to Marshall Foch of the French (1/8/31). One
additional comparison he frequently makes for American audiences is
Tammany Hall and Charles Murphy, suggesting Stalin is to be understood
in the context of American machine politics of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Again, by 1931 Stalin had certainly transcended the scale
of American machine politics by any stretch of the imagination. By 1931 the
Stalinist dictatorship had murdered hundreds of thousands of its own peasant
citizens as they refused to submit to Moscow's dictates to collectivize.
The Tammany Hall parallel is, once again, distorting because of its
relativizing and familiarizing effects, suggesting that Stalin is really not
much worse or more threatening than a New York City boss.

Any Conclusions?

Duranty was neither unique among reporters nor even many
scholars of the time in sharing these unbalanced and, ultimately,
condescending, views of Russian history and the Soviet people. Moreover,
several foreign correspondents fell under Stalin's spell to a certain
extent, as Duranty clearly did, especially if they had been granted the
privilege of an interview with the great man. And, after all, he certainly
did turn out to be one of the most important political leaders of the
twentieth century. Unfortunately, however, such views do not make his
reporting distinguished or particularly unusual, let alone profound; I would
not judge that his reporting has stood an even minimal test of time given
the criteria I tried to outline in my critique of his "theories."

After reading through a good portion of Duranty's reporting for
1931, I was disappointed and disturbed by the overall picture he painted of
the Soviet Union for that period. Much of the "factual" material is dull
and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources, whereas his efforts at
"analysis" are very effective renditions of the Stalinist leadership's
self-understanding of their murderous and progressive project to defeat the
backwardness of Slavic, Asiatic peasant Russia. That hundreds, if not
thousands, of well-intentioned and intelligent European and American leftist
intellectuals shared much of this Stalinist understanding of might making
for right and a sort of Hegelian acceptance of historical outcomes,
especially against the backdrop of the Great Depression in the West, does
not make his writing any more profound or original. But after reading so
much Duranty in 1931 it is far less surprising to me that he would deny in
print the famine of 1932-33 and later defend the prosecutors' charges during
the show trials of 1937.

I believe there is room in international reporting for an
effort to convey the "Soviet" point of view, meaning the official one,
without leaving it, however at that; instead, he would seem to have some
obligation to take the analysis to a different level by suggesting alternate
plausible explanations and motivations for events and actions. In other
words, there is a serious lack of balance in his writing. Instead, Duranty
is very insistent by this time in his own authority and understanding of the
reality of Stalinist Russia. He prided himself on his "independent"
judgments that went at odds with the conventional wisdom in Moscow.
He even acknowledged earlier "misunderstandings" of Soviet political
culture to reinforce his hard won expertise and current level of
understanding (10/11/31). It is a clever rhetorical device but adds nothing
to the overall analysis.

That lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet
self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime was a disservice to the
American readers of the NYT and the liberal values they subscribe to and
to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet
empires and their struggle for a better life.

By Eric Wolff, Special to the Sun
The New York Sun, New York, New York
October 22, 2003; Section: Front page; Page:1

The tarnish is thickening on the New York Times's most controversial
Pulitzer Prize.

A report commissioned by the Times said the work of 1932 Pulitzer
Prize-winner Walter Duranty had a "serious lack of balance," was
"distorted," and was "a disservice to American readers of the New York
Times.and the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires."

According to the writer of the report, a Columbia University history
professor, Mark von Hagen, a committee of Times senior staff that included
publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. read it and then forwarded it to the
Pulitzer board, along with a recommendation from Mr. Sulzberger.

The nature of that recommendation is unknown.

Duranty's award is under review by a subcommittee of the Pulitzer board,
as reported by The New York Sun in June.

The study, commissioned less than a month after the resignation of the
executive editor, Howell Raines, over the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fraud
scandal, marks a change in position at the Times.

In June, the paper issued a prepared statement that said,"The Times has
not seen merit in trying to undo history."

A Times spokeswoman said she had no comment on the apparently new
policy. The administrator of the Pulitzer board, Sigvard Gissler, would not
comment, saying,"This is an internal matter."

In an interview with the Sun, Mr. von Hagen said, "I was really kind of
disappointed having to read that stuff, and know that the New York Times
would publish this guy for so long."

Mr. von Hagen's paper said Duranty's 1931 pieces were "very effective
renditions of the Stalinist leadership's style of self-understanding of
their murderous and progressive project."

He said Duranty's reporting was "neither unique among reporters" nor
"particularly unusual, let alone profound." He noted Duranty's failure to
use the diverse sources available to him, and the way Duranty "ignored the
history of 20th century Russia."

Duranty reported that Soviet citizens celebrated their "freedom" from
religion by increasing factory production on religious holidays.

"One waits in vain for some signal of ever so slight tongue-in-cheek,"
wrote Mr. von Hagen.

Duranty's work has been reviewed before, in 1990, prompted by Sally
Taylor's biography, "Stalin's Apologist." The biography suggested that
Duranty was not ideological Communist, but rather a greedy man who had
made a comfortable life for himself in Moscow.

Mr. von Hagen believes Duranty's misdirection may have come from a
vested interest in seeing the Soviet Union recognized by the United States.
When Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1933, he invited Duranty to dinner
to discuss the matter.

At the banquet at the same, in which the U.S.S.R. was formally
recognized, the biggest applause, according to Malcolm Muggeridge, was
given to Duranty.

Though Duranty has achieved lasting posthumous fame for covering up
the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in which as many as 10 million people died,
the Pulitzer was awarded for his writing in 1931.

In an effort to divest Duranty of his prize, the Ukrainian Congress
Committee of America organized a postcard campaign that ultimately led to
the formation of the subcommittee for review.

A spokeswoman for the UCCA said she found the Times's actions "very
encouraging" considering Duranty's "betrayal of the most fundamental aspects
of journalism."

In November, they will be launching a campaign to get the Times to
voluntarily return the prize, a sentiment that sits well with Mr. von Hagen.

"I wish they didn't give Duranty the prize in the first place," he said.
"But I think it should be rescinded now, for the honor of the New York
Times, if for nothing else."